SLG Business Brief: Partnerships, Re-orgs and more ERP

The week of January 10, 2011 saw some corporate actions including a partnership, a consolidation and reorganization, a public sector division pat-on-the back and a few contract wins in Louisiana and Ohio. Meanwhile, a deal in Maine adds some red to one company’s ledger and Ann Arbor, Michigan gets paid for helping a neighbor with the IT rent.

Tyler Technologies landed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) deal with the Columbus City Schools in Ohio – the state’s largest school district with more than 50k students. The five-year, $6 million deal is the largest Software-as-a-Service to date for Tyler’s Munis solution, the company said. Rod Houpe, CIO for Columbus City Schools, said the solution will help the district re-engineer its business processes and adopt best practices for efficiency gains.

This past Tuesday, Accenture and Plexis launched a joint solution meant to improve states’ Medicaid Management Information Systems. The move will bolster Accenture’s Public Health Platform by leveraging Accenture’s system integration, project management and software development capabilities with Plexis’s automated health claims processing software.

Dell Services has announced this week that Steve Schuckenbrock will be its new president. Mr. Schuckenbrock succeeds Peter Altabef, who oversaw the integration of Perot Systems into Dell. In a related move, Dell will consolidate its Public and Large Enterprise business units (to be called Public-Large Enterprise business unit) into a single organization focused on supporting the needs of these customers, where Paul Bell will serve as president of the new business unit. Over the past year, the Services team says it met or exceeded all of its integration milestones, achieving more than $100 million in cost savings in FY 2011 and capturing revenue synergies of more than $150 million.

The City of Alexandria, Louisiana is throwing away its old AutoCAD and AutoCAD 3D software in exchange for a new system by Autodesk, Inc. to help improve the tracking, accuracy and maintenance of the city’s utility services infrastructure. The City of Alexandria selected Autodesk Topobase to create a central repository for its geospatial data and asset information. The company said Alexandria will be able to use a single solution for all of its utilities – electric, gas, water, and wastewater.

In a self-congratulatory moment, CGI Group Inc. said that its US Public Sector division closed FY 2011 with $550 million in contracts. Most of those wins came from CGI Federal Inc., who won deals with GSA, CMS, the EPA and the US Marine Corps, the company said. One state and local deal highlighted was the $15.6 million deal with Mesa, first reported in SLG Business Brief last week.

Momentarily focusing on the other side of the ledger, Massachusetts-based Managed Technologies Partners (formerly CBE Holdings and an affiliate of CBE Technologies) was ordered to pay the Maine Department of Administrative & Financial Services $410,000 after a lawsuit claimed the vendor made “excessive profits” over the last four years. The state and CBE Technologies still have a business relationship, as the suit only covered invoices from 2004 to 2008.

Finally, a feel good story: Ann Arbor, Michigan has agreed to enter into a shared services deal with Chealsea, Michigan. Ann Arbor’s IT shop will provide Chelsea with round-the-clock technology support, including the management of Chelsea’s website, content and technology for Channel 18, the city’s local TV station, as well as the city’s software and hardware, AnnArbor.com reported Thursday. In addition to the $32,000 contract for one year, Kim Garland, Chelsea’s administrative director, said Ann Arbor would have access to a number of “effective, low-cost, open-source solutions” currently being used by the city.


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